We need to talk about kevin ending a relationship

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Did Kevin respect his Mum after all? Showing of 52

"You are leaving, my darling boy. Director Lynne Ramsay's new film, We Need to Talk About Kevin, returns again and again to Phillips's song as it examines the relationship between Eva Khatchadourian (Tilda Swinton) and. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" challenges the concept of motherly love. a child , and later, when she gives birth (to Kevin), we get a look at how their relationship is. Eva asks Kevin the big “why” at the end of the movie. If you have a relationship/dating question I can help answer, you can And if so, what does it say about Eva's mothering that Celia ended up.

She says she wasn't making "an issue-based film"; it's supposed to be just "psychological horror".

we need to talk about kevin

Yet if this is a mere horror film, it isn't a very good one. The randomised chronology removes any element of suspense, while the relentless grand guignol symbolism would embarrass the genre's journeymen. If it's neither a cheap scarer nor a harrowing slice of life, perhaps it's being taken as a kind of lurid parable. Some seem to view Eva as an icon of the martyred middle-class mother, stripped of her identity by a sprog who dares to defy her requirements.

If that's the way this film takes you, fair enough. For my money however, it conveys a slightly different text for our times.

The film concentrates on Eva, but it isn't Eva who's dictating what happens. She's at the mercy of her menfolk, who embody between them two archetypes of masculinity that loom ever larger on the big screen and elsewhere. Kevin's a sociopath, and his dad's a dope.

We need to talk about men, not Kevin

Virtually all of the high-school rampage killers have of course been male. Violence is essentially a guy thing. Yet so are Kevin's emotional brutality, detachment from other people and unrelenting truculence. He epitomises the stubborn male refusal to co-operate with social norms, practical needs, ordinary decency or common sense. His father Franklin isn't up to either marriage or parenthood.

Implausible Psycho: “We Need to Talk About Kevin” | Film Quarterly

Plot[ edit ] In the wake of a school massacre by Kevin, the 15 year old son of Franklin Plaskett and Eva Khatchadourian, Eva writes letters to Franklin. In these letters she relates the history of her relationship with her husband, and the events of Kevin's life up to the killings, and her thoughts concerning their relationship. She also reveals events that she tried to keep secret, such as when she lashed out and broke Kevin's arm in a sudden fit of rage. She is also shown visiting Kevin in prison, where they appear to have an adversarial relationship.

Kevin displays little to no affection or moral responsibility towards his family or community, seemingly regarding everyone with contempt and hatred, especially his mother, whom he antagonizes.

He engages in many acts of petty sabotage from an early age, from seemingly innocent actions like spraying ink with a squirt gun on a room his mother has painstakingly wallpapered in rare maps, to possibly encouraging a girl to gouge her eczema -affected skin. The one activity he takes any pleasure in is archery, having read Robin Hood as a child.

And it asks the question all America has asked itself: However, it is not the novel's ostensible subject matter that has made it an underground success in the US. Told through letters from the killer's mother, Eva, to her absent husband, Franklin, the book explores the trials of maternity and the traumatic impact it can have on a marriage.

As such it has been hailed as taboo-breaking, but it is difficult to see why.

Implausible Psycho: “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Anyone who has ever expected a baby, or even just opened a pregnancy book, will be familiar with the anxieties associated with preparing for parenthood. Eva's unease about what she is doing and why, and whether she even really wants a child, isn't a well-kept secret.

It's partly hormonal, but it's largely natural: Eva's sense of defeat at the birth of her son Kevin, her failure to breastfeed and the multiple difficulties she experiences with the sleepless, shrieking infant, are also familiar.